BLUNKETT PAST AND PRESENT

Peter Hitchens explores the

true extent of the Education Secretary's class ties

WHAT would David Blunkett's image be, if it were not for the howling hecklers of the National Union of Teachers? Three Years ago they wiped out his old reputation as a steel-hard commissar in a few minutes of farce, by locking him in a cupboard while yelling silly slogans at him. This was unpleasant, but perhaps tells us more about the hecklers than it does about their victim. The concrete-heads of the NUT Left, stranded forever somewhere near 1968, would probably lock Leon Trotsky himself in a cupboard if he turned up at their conference, and so make him appear moderate.

But is David Blunkett really a moderate man? Unlike most of his Cabinet col- leagues, he does not inhabit that smooth, safe postwar world where most of us grew UP. The harshness of his childhood blindness early separation from his par- ents, the horrible death of his father and the poverty which followed — is more typi- cal of the Victorian age than of our own. Mr Blunkett is not an oily careerist or a guilty zillionaire, though he thought seri- ously about becoming a Methodist preach- er. He wielded power in a great city, and showed himself to be a thorough-going man of the Left in practice as well as theo- TY. Yet he is also one of the Labour leader- ship's most self-disciplined converts to ostensible moderation, literacy and disci- pline, charged with persuading middle- class parents that is is safe for their sons and daughters to go to state schools once more.

But what does Mr Blunkett really think schools are for? And what is his private view of those parents who have learned to mistrust the state education system during the last two decades? According to the Times, he recently told colleagues that parents who send their children to private schools should be whipped'. A joke? If so, not a very funny one, especially in the light of Mr Blunkett's own past and present. Why did he once want to put VAT on school fees? Why is he, even now, busily depriving poor children of good education by dismantling the assisted places scheme? Which is the real David Blunkett? Perhaps the past holds a clue. The reference to whipping stirs memo- ries of the days when Mr Blunkett's Sheffield Council abolished the cane, back in 1981. This action may seem uncontro- versial 17 years later in a society where lawful violence is banned and illegal vio- lence flourishes. At the time, it was still a radical thing to do, and only part of a rev- olutionary daze which settled on south Yorkshire in the Blunkett era.

Turn to the Sheffield Star of 2 Septem- ber 1981 and you will find the story of `gifted' David Brodie, aged ten, whose parents wanted him to transfer to a sec- ondary school a year early, to take advan- tage of his obvious brightness. No such luck; but this wasn't the usual story of inflexible bureaucracy refusing to change course, it was a political act. His mother and father complained, 'The authority says it is elitist to promote children like David.'

Many other parents of bright children forced to tread water by inflexible, anti- elitist speed-of-the-slowest state schools will know exactly how the Brodies felt. Such anti-elitism, with its smarmy coating of egalitarian moralism, is rather hard to fight unless you are very tough and well- informed and preferably rich.

Perhaps the victims of anti-elitism were relieved to know that Sheffield, rather actively twinned with the Soviet mining hell-hole of Donetsk, was deeply opposed to militarism — well, British militarism, anyway. This is all so long ago (Raiders of the Lost Ark was the hot new movie) that it is difficult to credit. But it happened, gen- tle reader, it happened. And those who were there at the time suspect that it was 'a passion, not a fashion' for Mr Blunkett.

The New Model Sheffield did not like school uniforms any more than it did mili- tary ones. Labour had even gone into the previous election with a promise that they would get rid of them. However, they seem to have been unsure of their mandate, because they took the risky step of holding a specific vote on the issue. The result was not what they wanted, so they ignored it. But the chairman of the schools sub-com- mittee, Joan Barton, explained to readers of the Star with quite astonishing chutzpah why the parents' inconvenient views were to be overridden: 'We did explain at the outset of asking for people's views that this was not a referendum. We didn't say we would decide along the lines people voted for.'

The uniforms duly went. Mr Blunkett (then unbearded) later admitted that the handling of the issue had been at fault. His tortured justification for going ahead any- way appears to be an ingenious attempt to link the wearing of blazers with support for General Pinochet and apartheid: 'The council recognises criticisms of those coun- tries and regimes carrying out what we consider to be dictatorial and totalitarian actions, requiring uniformity and compul- sion which we hopefully can manage to do without,' he wrote. 'The council therefore decided not to do away with school uni- forms, but to allow individuals and their families to comply reasonably with a stan- dard of dress which was acceptable to the school.' Mr Blunkett had invented the world's first non-compulsory school uni- form. It appears to have taken him 14 years to discover that this was an oxy- moron. In August 1995, he voted in favour of restoring uniforms at the Sheffield com- prehensive school his sons attended.

Clark Herron was the education reporter for the Star during this period of turmoil. He still has strong sympathy with much of what Blunkett's council was trying to do, and says that they ran several extremely good schools with high stan- dards. He praises them for successfully cutting class sizes, which is still a Labour shibboleth. It is also a shibboleth which could do with a bit of close examination (see below). But Mr Herron, like many of those involved, saw and sees it as evidence of a strong, idealistic commitment.

He also recalls a radical policy on school catchment areas, deliberately slicing up the city like a pizza, so that many children from poor quarters went automatically to secondary schools in gentle suburbs. This has a kind of laudable honesty about it. If you believe in comprehensives it is an out- rage against the ideal when well-off people are able to buy their children places in bet- ter schools simply because they can afford big mortgages. But an arbitrary line on a map is just as rigid as the 11-plus exam which Mr Blunkett hates with every fibre of his being — and it does not have that exam's great virtue, that it selects by ability only, not by address or bank balance.

David Heslop, a Sheffield Tory council- lor, has weathered almost two decades of municipal socialism and has no doubt that Mr Blunkett was an active supporter of all the revolutions Labour set going, not just a lofty spectator. 'His whole attitude, body language, speeches, policies, everything he said and did, made me think he was gen- uinely left-wing. He is totally different now. I have never worked out which is the real one.'

But perhaps the contradiction between Old Blunkett and New Blunkett is false. The Left's long march through the schools was never meant to do as much damage as it did. Lady Plowden did not intend to produce a generation of semi-literates who could not count or even tell the time, when she endorsed the changes that were to wreck almost every primary school in the country. Margaret Cole and the rest of the comprehensive fanatics did not, could not, have imagined the sort of non-schools which would be created by their ideal. I suspect that Mr Blunkett is as disgusted as anyone by the way in which his party's education authorities have robbed the working class of knowledge.

His anger at the mess and his determi- nation to do something about it are not in doubt. But he remains a socialist, of the sort whose politics is a kind of religion. Unless he is utterly unlike the rest of his movement, he regards the state school sys- tem as a mechanism for social engineering above all else. For socialists, education is class war carried on by other means. Any- one who thinks this is no longer so should look at the strangling of the assisted places scheme, this government's one measurable action in the field of education so far. Sup- posed to reduce class sizes, this has all the high ideals and sophistication of a gang of yobs taunting and baiting a clever boy from the same street, because he is wear- ing a grammar-school tie.

The only serious research on class sizes, in Tennessee; found that they make pre- cious little difference to the quality of edu- cation, except at entry level. Even there, the gains are not exciting, and the real explanation may be that smaller classes have a narrower ability range. A sceptic might suggest that this particular policy is `Please don't release me! I value my freedom in here.' rather good news for the teacher unions because it is bound to boost their numbers.

The other main Blunkett policies are also curious choices, if better schooling is their main purpose. Behind a smokescreen of dubious summer literacy programmes (at best, not proven effective) and general exhortations to do better, this Department plans to give back lost powers to the very local education authorities that have done so much harm already, and to stamp on the sensible- selective policies used by many good grant-maintained schools. It is also working on watering down A levels, and seems set on debasing the gold standard of university education, with a more or less direct attack on Oxbridge. Mr Blunkett has also given primary schools a licence to cut down their already inadequate teaching of subjects such as history, supposedly to allow them to concentrate on reading and writing.

As a socialist, David Blunkett cannot really accept the fact that it is the Left's relentless social engineering which is the real reason for the failure of so many schools. The social engineers, glowing with anti-elitist righteousness, resist academic selection; dislike passing on conservative British culture in English, history and geog- raphy, feel uncomfortable with order imposed from above, distrust rigorous, objective examinations, see the great uni- versities as ruling class bastions and scorn faith as a minority interest. They see schools as machines for changing the national culture, not as instruments for passing on that culture. The things they do are actually the disease, not merely the symptoms of it. It is just these influences which cause our schools to take children for 11 impressionable and irreplaceable years of their lives, and turn them out at the end of it in a fog of ignorance and moral relativism.

Mr Blunkett's Tory predecessors all failed to defeat the social engineers. They were cut off at the knees by a schools establishment they did not understand, mainly because they had no personal expe- rience of modern state education. Mr Blun- kett has the huge advantage, not shared by his Cabinet colleagues or by most Tories, of knowing precisely how bad our schools are. His difficulty is that he does not — yet — grasp why they are failing so tragically, because his socialist faith stands in the way. If Mr Blunkett wishes to be a great educa- tion reformer rather than just another Sec- retary of State for Stunts and Gimmicks, he will have to recant more than the excesses of his Sheffield period. As a serious man, probably one of the few on the front bench who has heard of and knows anything about John Wesley and John Bunyan, he may even come to recognise that a moral politician, who truly seeks to serve and help the poor, is better off without the burden of egalitarianism upon his back.

The author writes for the Express.